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Monday 08 of February, 2010

The Business Challenges We Tackle

SVT™ & 4D™

The 4D™ Approach A Rigorous Approach Group Partners brings structure, Collaboration, Visualization and rigorous architectures for thinking. We bring all of this and more to bear on complex problems... See also A Vision Model - Now and The 'Pixar' Of Consulting The Detailed Road Map The right environment for thinking - we describe the 'places' we create as Innovation Lounges. Places and spaces where we can encourage the best possible theater in which to create value... See also the Innovation Dimension Our Overall Approach - 4D™ 4D™ Takes the entire through what we could do - Discovery - what we should do - Development - what we will do - Decision - and what we agreed we would do - Deployment See also 4D™ and Structured Visual Thinking™ A Systems Approach SVT Live™ ensures that we create Visual Displays, that can quickly turn into A Vision Model to communicate the whole strategy or vision to the entire enterprise... The Vision Discussed Architectures and frameworks at each step can act as important governance throughout complex change and transformation programs...See also Persistent Architecture Developing Strategy As we work through the assignments we can develop large representations of the progress this image is 30ft long and 8 ft tall and explains the 11 conversations of the Discovery Framework... See also Discovery Structure The Detailed Actions We can take deep dives into complex programs and ensure clear line of sight between actions and initiatives... Drawing Conclusions The Original Size that this was drawn was 8ft x 8ft. This meant that the team involved could get right into the details of the ideas we were discussing. Making Meaning A 'visual' approach means that we can talk to the users, beneficiaries and the important stakeholders in language that they will readily understand. See also A Vision Model An Interactive Roadmap The vital roadmap and action plan for the program. In our framework this means what we stay doing, what we start doing and what we stop doing as a result of the outcomes of the assignment. See also A Vision Model Interactive Customer Journeys Explaining the insights and events of a process change in this case along a specific stakeholders cycle/time-line. See also A Vision Model Interactive Vision Scenarios A digitised explanation of a possible future for a complex enterprise undergoing a technology and cultural change. See also A Vision Model The Future Vision Recognisable and evocative expressions of possible futures brought to life within the environmental ambitions of an enterprise. See also A Vision Model '

Whatever the challenge we aim to create the right frame around it - build the appropriate context - get the data. In the process of this we create meaning - ensure its actually understood by those who have to deliver! We tackle the main challenges that effect business today. From lack of vision to competitive disadvantage. From how should we think about the future to how can we win more business - from lack of innovation or alignment or differentiation to cultural disarray.

There are many methods, designed by consultants, service providers and agencies big or small, to every conceivable business challenge - we admire a lot of them. We have no problem with this or that methodology, this or that tool. The thing that stirs us into action and gets us to push back is when these approaches are applied in isolation or for their own sakes.

We have been Clients ourselves, we have suffered through almost every business challenge. We have the utmost respect for the client, they are in need of real and impartial advice. Our approach is to simply frame the question properly, stand back, engage with a cross functional team, see the big picture, think differently.

See References, Conversations, Pattern Recognition, Information Design, Complexity, Efficiencies, Thinking and Facilitation

The Typical issues we tackle

Our approach to the following issues and opportunities varies only slightly according to each assignment Below this we give some of the context, some observations from around our world and some clues as to how we think.

• Developing Customer Excellence and Experience. See Customer Experience Frameworks, Experience Frameworks™
• Aligning Leadership teams around a new vision or a strategy. See Vision
• Creating new meaning within the enterprise to cause sustainable change. See Meaning Making
• Developing Efficiency and Effectiveness in the Operation. (Lean/Six Sigma)
• Building Sustainable & Ethical Businesses and Business Cases.
• Creating or Redefining Corporate Strategy. See 4D™
• Creating or Defining a Future Vision. See 4D™
• Business Transformation, Planning and Creation of Change Programs. See 4D™
• Cultural Change, Behavioral and Leadership Strategies. See 4D™
• Creating Innovation in New Products or Services. See Structured Visual Thinking™
• Winning Bids and helping Develop Differentiated presentations. See Winning Bids
• Developing Coherent Internal Communication Strategies. See Communication

Our aim is always to create shared meaning and a clear path. We fully support our clients along these often tricky journeys.

See 4D Applications

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Highlighted Case

One of the big areas we cover today is how an organisation meets the demands of its fickle customers and realigns its business processes accordingly. See Complexity

Why the neglect?

CEO’s may not actively deny the significance of customer experience or, for that matter, the tools used to collect, quantify, and analyze it, but many don’t adequately appreciate what those tools can reveal. Three forces in the main conspire to preserve this gap.

Too much money already lavished on CRM. CEO’s consider their problem not to be a lack of customer information but a superfluity of it. Before investing more time and money, executives justifiably want to know how how ‘customer experience’ data are different and what their value is. CRM tracks customer actions after the fact.

CEM (Customer Experience Management) captures the immediate response of the customer to its encounters with the company. Many CEO’s don’t sufficiently appreciate the distinction between marketing, or customer service.

Fear of what the data may reveal. It’s easy to say one’s business is is customer driven when there are no data to prove otherwise. Once data start flowing, the bogeymen come out of the closet. Can we afford to do what the customers are asking for? How do we choose between the conflicting preferences? Can we accept what customers say they are experiencing without first telling them what they should be experiencing? Corporate leaders who would never tolerate a large gap between forecasted and actual revenues prefer to look the other way when company and customer assessments diverge.

Executives also hesitate to act on findings because experience data are more ambiguous than customers’ actions – the orders they place, for instance. However statistical analysis has developed to the point where it can dependably quantify both the relative importance of each touch point and the experience it provided. Properly understood, the currents beneath the surface that direct the flow of customer experience data will indicate the shape of the next major transformation.

Customer Experience

See Experience Frameworks
A definition of Customer Experience:

“Customer Experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use and service and is usually initiated by the customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company’s products, services or brands and takes the form of word of mouth recommendations or criticisms, advertising, news reports, reviews, and so forth. Such an encounter could occur when Google’s whimsical holiday logos pop up on the sites home page at the beginning of a search, or it could be the distinctive “potato, potato” sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle’s exhaust system. It might just be an e-mail from one customer to another” - Christopher Meyer & Andre Schwager Harvard Business Review

Three Cases

Apple: A customers experience with an Apple device begins long before the purchaser turns it on – in the case of the iPod, perhaps with the dancing silhouettes in the TV advertisements. The origami like (and recyclable) packaging enfolds the iPod as though it were a Faberge egg made for a Czar.

A small sticker “Designed in California, made in China,” communicates the message that Apple is firmly in charge but also interested in keeping costs down. Even Windows users appreciate the device’s intuitive Mac-Like feel and find that downloading tracks from iTunes is easier than buying a CD on Amazon. Every Apple Product is designed with the overarching purpose of making the time one spends with Apple an enjoyable experience.

BMW: A successful brand shapes customers’ experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in offerings’ every feature. For BMW, “the Ultimate Driving Machine” is much more than a slogan; it informs the company’s manufacturing and design choices. In 2000, Mercedes Benz introduced a system that automatically controls the distance between a Mercedes and the car in front. BMW would not consider developing such a feature unless it enhanced rather than diminished the driving experience.

Fed-Ex: Service quality and scope matter, too, but mostly when the core offer is itself a service. For example , the tracking and shipping support Fed-Ex provides on the internet and by phone is as important to its customers as its fundamental value proposition – on-time delivery. In their concern with logistics – how something is provided, not just what is provided – business-to-business companies take after consumer-services companies. For both, the goal is to provide a positive experience to the end user.

Whether it is a business or a consumer being studied, data about it’s experiences are collected at “touch-points”: instances of direct contact either with the product or service itself or with the representations of it by the company or some third party. We might use the term ‘customer corridor’ to portray the series of touch points that a customer experiences. What constitutes a meaningful touch point to a customer changes over the course of a customers life. For a young family with limited time and resource s, a brief encounter with an insurance broker or financial planner may be adequate. The same sort of experience wouldn’t satisfy a senior with lot’s of time and a substantial asset base.

The insights:

Not all touch points are of equivalent value. Service interactions matter much more when the core offering is a service. Touch points that advance the customer to a subsequent and more valuable interaction, such as Amazon’s straightforward 1-Click ordering, matter even more. Companies need to map the corridor of touch points and watch for snarls. At each touch point the gap between customer expectations and experience spells the difference between customer delight and something else.

People’s expectations are set in part by their previous experiences with a companies offerings. Customers instinctively compare each new experience, positive or otherwise with their previous ones and judge it accordingly. Expectations can also be shaped by market conditions, the competition and the customer’s personal situation. Even when its the company’s own brand that establishes expectations, the customer can be set up for disappointment.

A Case in point:

For example Dell transformed buying computers over the internet from a risky to a reliable experience. When it extended that set of procedures to the selection and purchase of expensive plasma HDTV sets, however it disappointed. Dell did an effective job of creating positive customer expectations, but they turned out to be better fulfilled by the in-person sales force at Best Buy.

Ideally good design makes both the most routine and the weightiest customer experiences – checking a price, getting a question answered, or placing a multi-million pound order – pleasant and efficient. However even when dissatisfaction or wariness arises, artful control of customer experience can overcome it.

The Change required internally:

Customer Experience does not improve until it becomes a top priority and a companies work processes, systems and structure change to reflect that. When employees observe senior managers persistently demanding experience information and using it to make tough decisions, their own decisions are conditioned by that awareness.

Once persuaded of the importance of experience, every function has a role to play:

Marketing has to capture the tastes and standards of every one of its target segments, circulate that knowledge within the company and then tailor all communication accordingly. Service operations must ensure that processes, skills and practices are attuned to every touch point. (Present patterns surveys are good for tracking high-volume touch points such as call centres)

Product development should do more than specify needed features. It should also design experiences after observing how customers use products and services, learning why they use offerings as they do, and figuring out how existing products might be frustrating them. Ideally product developers will identify customer behaviour that runs counter to a company’s expectations and uncover needs that haven’t been identified.

Information and Technology that can collect, analyze, and distribute CEM data, integrate the information with that generated by CRM, and monitor progress must be in place. As the data flow stabilises, the form of presentation and its degree of detail should be keyed to whichever internal audience the data are meant for.

Human resources should put together a communications and training strategy that conveys the economic rationale for CEM and paints a picture of how it will alter work processes and the decision making process. Since the front line determines the bulk of the customer experience it is also a good idea to study these employees individual capabilities, work processes and attitudes. As for performance management, customer experience results should affect compensation. But incentives that are too powerful are more likely to distort behaviour than channel it productively.

Account teams must progress from annual surveys to detailed touch point analysis, then translate present patterns of customer experience and issues gleaned fro recent transactions in to action plans that are shared with customers.

So.

Customer dissatisfaction is widespread and, because of customer’ empowerment, increasingly dangerous. Although companies know a lot about customers’ buying habits, incomes and other characteristics used to classify them, they know little about thoughts, emotions, and states of mind that customer’s interactions with products, services, and brands induce. Yet unless companies know about these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them, customer satisfaction is more a slogan than an attainable goal.

Introduction

This section describes the general fields within which we work and discusses the challenges faced by businesses - We describe the Group Partner 4D™ Philosophy to Problem Solving.

Answering the critical questions in today’s business:

4D™ is designed to answer questions.
See Complexity

For us that can mean how to launch a new product or service. How can I develop a common way of working for my operation? What is my strategy? How can we win in the marketplace? How do I get everyone in my enterprise on-board and behind the leadership team? An countless others.

A major question, given a clear vision or set of objectives, is therefore how to build an efficient ‘system’ to do this. In our terms a ‘system’ means the complete process of design, development and delivery of the companies products and services to its customers.

Every aspect of 4D™ points towards a more effective customer centric outcome and encourages rigorous thinking around how to make the experience of being a customer a more powerful experience.

The overriding purpose of an optimal and efficient system is to configure the companies assets, its ‘material resources’, its talent and skills (workforce) in a way that improves the process flow to the customer's benefit. The enterprise must do this while minimizing losses caused by waste, variability, and inflexibility.

These forms of loss are apparent in many underperforming organizations. The effect is seen in all service areas. Slow or incomprehensible delivery of goods. The consumer waiting in lines. Slow response via the call or contact centres and so on.

Visualisation Processes in Customer Programs

Visualised Frameworks and the key artefacts we build combined with the benchmarking and other metrics provide rigorous and contextually powerful materials. In addition we create visually impactful & high quality documentation - communicable ‘machinery’ for each assignment.

'These creates valuable presentation devices to illustrate hypotheses, demonstrate interlocked planning activity, help demonstrate continuous improvement over time, & assist in the integrating of the overlapping business project/technology layers that and ensure that all reviews are optimised. Also this enables the story outwards/upwards to staff & management - efficiency in stakeholder communication, building one language – one version of the truth.

Clear Line of Sight: There are key areas we might imagine visualising and making interactive ideas and scenarios within an overarching framework:

• Release Schedules. (Technology, Capability, etc.).
• Operational Blueprints. The Data Planning, Workflow and Analysis Progress and actions.
• Test & Learn Phases with updates and alerts.
• Process & Cultural Change Strategy as a vision and educational tool.
• Evaluation & MI strategy, data and metrics displays as an integrated system.
• Illustrations of ‘Risk Registers’.
• Alignment of KPI’s. Actionable KPI Dashboard.
• Impacts on the ‘Related Projects’.

In effect we are able to bring the underpinning business processes to life.